Elliot Powell - "Werk It! Missy Elliott, queer hip hop, & the musical aesthetics of impropriety",

The Social Justice Institute 2019-2020 Noted Scholar Series presents, "Werk It! Missy Elliott, queer hip hop, & the musical aesthetics of impropriety", Elliot Powell - Nov. 9, 2019.

This talk examines the musical queer potentiality of African American female rapper Missy Elliott. Recently, U.S. popular music studies scholars have explored Elliott’s sartorial style and music videos in order to interrogate her rumored non-heterosexual identity. Yet, such approaches not only elide Elliott’s own music and its sexual expressions, but they also use the static category of lesbian as the sole marker of female non-heterosexual sexual identities and expressions. As such, this talk asks: What happens when we shift our focus of Missy Elliott from sight to sound? What new possibilities and alternative imaginings emerge if we move away from the identity category of lesbian to the analytic of queer(ness)? Drawing on interviews and musical analysis, I argue that Elliott musically inhabits, expresses, and produces queerness through a set of cultural practices that I refer to as the musical aesthetics of impropriety. I define the musical aesthetics of impropriety as performative expressions that are developed and deployed at the level of the sound recordings, that allow us to imagine and articulate queerness in hip hop differently, and that emerge through a sustained rejection and subversion of any and all means by which bodies, desires, pleasures, and sexual practices become indicative of or register as visible and “proper” subjects.
This talk examines the musical queer potentiality of African American female rapper Missy Elliott. Recently, U.S. popular music studies scholars have explored Elliott’s sartorial style and music videos in order to interrogate her rumored non-heterosexual identity. Yet, such approaches not only elide Elliott’s own music and its sexual expressions, but they also use the static category of lesbian as the sole marker of female non-heterosexual sexual identities and expressions. As such, this talk asks: What happens when we shift our focus of Missy Elliott from sight to sound? What new possibilities and alternative imaginings emerge if we move away from the identity category of lesbian to the analytic of queer(ness)? Drawing on interviews and musical analysis, I argue that Elliott musically inhabits, expresses, and produces queerness through a set of cultural practices that I refer to as the musical aesthetics of impropriety. I define the musical aesthetics of impropriety as performative expressions that are developed and deployed at the level of the sound recordings, that allow us to imagine and articulate queerness in hip hop differently, and that emerge through a sustained rejection and subversion of any and all means by which bodies, desires, pleasures, and sexual practices become indicative of or register as visible and “proper” subjects.

Elliott H. Powell is assistant professor of American Studies at University of Minnesota. His work is primarily concerned with African American and South Asian (American) intercultural music-making endeavors during the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, and the ways in which these music-centered collaborative efforts articulate with larger socio-political formations and the complex and historically situated processes of identity formation.